With marvellous rapidity she picked up the jargon of the place, and could quite easily have taken her career in her own hands, but she would not surrender Mendel, who could no more do without her than he could without Mitchell. She clung to him and kept him a happy slave to his three friends, to whom she devoted herself as though her existence depended on the solidarity of the group. From morning to night she was with one or other of them, and every evening with the four of them at the Paris, or making a row at a music-hall and getting themselves kicked out. She was learning her trade as they were learning theirs, and she was delighted with the ease with which Mendel picked up what she called "sense"; that is to say, he became much more like the others, affected their speech, grew his hair long, wore corduroys, a black shirt, and a red sash, and talked blatantly and with a slight contempt of great painters. But even so, he was disturbing, for he did all these things with passion, so that they tinged his soul, and were not as a mere garment upon it. Even in falsehood he was sincere. When Hetty found Calthrop painting a self-portrait, she set her four boys painting self-portraits, and when she found the older men talking about the beauty of roofs and chimneys, the four were soon ecstatic about roofs and chimneys, and painting them without knowing how it had come about. She could feel what was in the air, and had no difficulty in making them conform to it, so that they were successful even while they were students, and were talked of and discussed and approached by dealers as though they were persons of consequence. Their life was one long intoxication: money, praise, wine, and debauchery went to their heads, and of all these excitants Mendel had the largest share, and found himself the equal even of Kessler, whose father was a millionaire soap-boiler. He attained an extraordinary skill at doing what was expected of him, and developed an instinct as sharp as Hetty's for the success of the moment after next. He won scholarships at the Detmold and, carefully adapting his style, an open prize at the Royal Academy. His patrons were excited and delighted. He was interviewed by the Yiddish papers and photographed, palette and brushes in hand, in a dashing attitude. He said many foolish things to the reporters, but the printed version made him blush. He was represented as saying that art had been reborn during the last ten years, that the Royal Academy was exploded and would soon close its doors, that there was no art criticism in England, that there had never been a great Jewish artist, and that this deficiency in the most vital and enduring race in the world would now be repaired.